'Alias' action heroine hides emotional underside
By Robert Bianco
USA Today
Jennifer Garner is a master of disguise.
Advertiser library photo • Jan. 2002
Odds are, few who saw the 29-year-old actress in her drab, short-lived Fox series "Significant Others" could have anticipated her Golden Globe-winning turn on ABC's "Alias" as Sydney Bristow, a physically intimidating yet emotionally vulnerable CIA agent/grad student pretending to be a counterspy pretending to be a banker.
Jennifer Garner receives a Golden Globe award for her performance in the TV series, Alias.
And no one watching her glam appeal on "Alias" — a show that features the most outrageous array of sexy costumes since Cher went off the air — would expect the fresh-faced, open young woman who shows up for an interview at a trendy Brentwood, Calif. restaurant sans makeup and the pretensions that often attend sudden stardom. The only clues that she stars on TV in an action-adventure hour are physical: a few bruises from a day spent jumping out of a ceiling vent and hauling herself in again, and a bump on her forehead from where she slammed her head into the camera during a fight scene.
"Thank goodness I love my job," Garner says.
But then a lot of people love the job she's doing, and not just the idiosyncratic voters who hand out the Globes. A complex, rapid-fire, wildly eccentric mixture of "La Femme Nikita," "The Girl From U.N.C.L.E." and "Once and Again," Garner's "Alias" is one of the few buzz-hot shows of this TV season. While it isn't a huge ratings hit along the lines of "CSI," "Alias" does well with the younger viewers that networks are so eager to court — so well that ABC already has renewed it for next season.
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As of now, however, success does not seem to have gone to Garner's head.
She praises her producer, J.J. Abrams, who also created "Felicity," and her three veteran co-stars — Ron Rifkin, Victor Garber and Carl Lumbly. ("It's not like I just appreciate them, I revere them.")
Most endearingly, she's humorously modest about her own contributions to "Alias" and blessedly unjaded about Hollywood. When a little girl asks for her autograph, Garner sweetly engages her in conversation.
Garner's level-headed attitude is no surprise to Abrams, who attributes it to maturity and family. "She's 29. She's had a lot of time to not work. She's a married woman. She has a down-to-earth family. She's not 19 and new to town. She's a real human being with a real solid perspective."
Of course, stardom and success are still new to her, and she owes them all a shot on "Felicity" she almost didn't get. "J.J. made me audition five times for that. For a guest spot. For one episode."
Whatever he thought of her audition, something in her performance won Abrams over. When he created "Alias," he told Garner he wanted her for the lead role. She was, to say the least, surprised.
"I asked, 'What did you see me in that made you think I could do this. 'Mr. Magoo'? 'Dude, Where's My Car?' "
Not exactly, Abrams says. "There was something about her that I just thought was really special. I always thought she had something in her personality that was funnier and sexier and smarter and more mischievous than anything I'd seen her do. And when I wrote Sydney, I wanted to show that."
Garner says she leaped at the chance to work with Abrams again, particularly if it meant playing an action heroine. ("I love that adrenaline rush.") But she was nervous, because Sydney is more than just tight costumes and high kicks.
Indeed, what separates "Alias" from the spy pack is Sydney's incredibly complicated emotional life — and the honest, just-under-the-surface fragility Garner brings to the role.
Sydney is a woman in hiding: hiding her identity as a spy from her friends, and her identity as a CIA agent from her employer, a nefarious spy ring known as SD-6. To make the hiding harder, in a mere 12 episodes, she has found her fiance murdered in her bathtub (a victim of SD-6), she has learned that her estranged father is actually a double agent for the CIA, and she has discovered that her late mother, whom she adored, was a KGB killer.
So you can excuse Garner if she thinks the physical side of the role is the easy part. "People talk like suddenly I'm an action chick. The hard stuff is the acting. It's like I do an emotional Olympics every week."
What makes the show even more demanding, she says, is that she has to make the big emotional scenes seem small and subtle, which is new for her. "I've never been subtle in my whole life. Either I play subtle characters very largely, or I play big characters."
That delicacy extends to the action/adventure side of the show, the spy capers that drive the plot. The goal, she says, is to make the spying seem real, to convey to an audience that Sydney is resourceful, yet also afraid, all without seeming melodramatic or "hokey."
And yes, sometimes hokeyness creeps in. Still, you can be forgiven if you're paying less attention to Sydney's suffering and more to her physical stunts — many of which Garner does herself. She was trained in ballet, which gave her strength, flexibility and an ability to remember complex choreography.
